Awwww

My cat has taken to sleeping in the bookcase...

Noted

I'll begin with a oft-repeated refrain: boy it's been a long time. But, I've been busy, so lay off, will ya.

Anyway, your Expat is shaking off his autumnal blues and post-Christmas weight gain to re-enter the blogosphere. Even tweeting. All in preparation for some exciting projects in the new year - stay tuned.

I spent Christmas in the usual way (the whisky, the shotgun, the sense of futility and dread) and lately have been kicking back reading and writing and relaxing. Relaxing, that is, until I read "The Dead", which is of course the final piece in Joyce's Dubliners. I read this every year around this time; it's snowy and takes place on the feast of the Epiphany - the 12th day of Christmas.

I used to have a lovely orange Penguin paperback edition, yet it seemed not to have survived my latest house move. So off to Oxfam to pick up the Penguin modern classics edition (sorry for screwing you on royalties, Joyce estate!), edited by Terence Brown, Trinity College Dublin.


What grated was that, unlike the orange Penguin, old Terry seems to want to stick his oar in and comment on almost every part of the story. Twice a page on average: the Dead is 49 pages long, yet there are 98 footnotes. The problem is that each of the notes are numbered and each time you interrupt your reading turning to the back thinking, 'Well this must be important,' and you are invariably disappointed. True, some are essential: a bit of Irish translated, the fact that 'Adam and Eve's' was Dublin slang for its Church of the Immaculate Conception. But many are interpretive and break the flow of the story. Naming the maid Lily may indeed be significant because it is the flower associated with the archangel Gabriel (the name of one of the main characters), but that could be told in an afterword.

What truly irritated was that so many were unnecessary, it seemed like Prof Brown was struggling to hit a word count. 'Dumb-bells' are 'weights for callisthenic exercises'. Glasgow, apparently, is a 'Scottish industrial city.' Who knew?

The solution for this is for Penguin to footnote like OUP does for their classics: not numbering them, so that they break up the story, but just having notes at the back which readers can refer to if stuck. Yet I suspect footnoting will become ever more intrusive going forward as traditional classics publishers strive to 'add value' to their books to combat the glut of free classics that are available on the internet.

The second biggest street party in the world, don't you know

To the Notting Hill Carnival on Sunday for my first time, and it sort of encapsulated everything about London. Up from the Central Line at Holland Park station (not Notting Hill Gate; Whitehall, my friend and guide said, that's for Carnival virgins) and meandering through tony, posh Ladbroke Grove, with its whitewashed Victorian townhouses, Chelsea tractors parked imperiously just inside vine covered gated drives. Richard Curtis London.

Then: turning into the Carnival, and the speed changes, a needle scratching along a classical LP and replaced by booming hip hop. Rammed shoulder to shoulder with a mass of multi-coloured, multi-cultural, multi-this-and-that humanity, accompanied by the thump-thump-thump of drum n bass, Afro beats, steel drums, a new sound around each corner and dancing, drinking, dancing, drinking. Zadie Smith London.


Then: sampling dubious looking but delicious but overpriced jerk chicken, several anxious waits in a port-a-loo queue, idly wondering why there are no bins and who the hell is going to clean up this mess, and finally the inevitably delayed, sweaty fug of an overcrowded tube ride home.

Friday bits and bobs

A few things that have caught my eye over the past week or so.

A nice freebie here. A journalist, Max Millard, interviewed the great and the good in New York City during the 1970s whilst working for a variety of newspapers, and he is giving away a free ebook of the interviews here and here. It is fascinating mostly for the wide range of people from Stan Lee to Betty Friedan to George Plimpton to Isaac Asimov.

Sony is launching a new eReader in the UK. I only mention this in order to post a gratuitous photo of the lovely Sadie Jones, who was at the launch at the British Library.



And, my little spot on BBC Radio 4's "You and Yours", yukking it up with Peter White about Potter-less Bloomsbury and the state of the trade.

How the dead live

So a touristy London weekend. On Saturday, propelled by Wolf Hall besotted-ness, I went to Hampton Court. It is an impressive, if schizophrenic palace, half Tudor, half Baroque. I love the Tudor bit most. Built by Cardinal Wolsey who gifted it to Henry VIII in order to forestall the good Cardinal's downfall (that didn't work so well), it's all about solidity, power, cowing and wowing guests, and it is so easy to imagine Henry stamping down the halls. Most of the exhibitions are done well, but there are some rather irksome 'let's engage the kids' sort of touches, like the ghostly whispering "divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, died" piped into one of the stairwells.

The clean lines and Versailles-lite of the later Baroque stuff I don't find as appealing. And something puts me off about the (admittedly impressive) wide expanse of formal gardens. They are two boxed in, regimented, controlled. It's all a-flower but it doesn't seem alive. Still, I did get to see the oldest and biggest grape vine in the world, which is something to tell the grandkids.




On Sunday, to Highgate Cemetary, which curiously felt so much more alive than the Hampton Court gardens. Sure, there is the box office draws of Karl Marx's and George Eliot's grave, but what I loved was the verdant, unchecked undergrowth creeping over tombstones, angel statues poking out through trees, vines above a group of graves with the ripe grapes dropping down so you squish them as you walk, the sweet smell of blackberries in the air, butterflies flitting amongst tombstones. It is not a place of death so much, but to celebrate the dead's lives.







The artist Patrick Caulfield's gravestone is quite frankly a work of genius...



...but this tiny aspirational inscription was my favourite of all.

The question is, will the Vamp be stiffer than Robert Pattison's acting?

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True lies

One of the more cherished lies the English tell themselves is that they are good sports, they never cheat, 'just not cricket' and all that. This particularly manifests itself in football, a sport which has its fair share of gamesmanship and cheating - Maradona's Hand of God which beat the English in the 1986 World Cup maybe the most famous example.

The subtext in the way the media here treats cheating in sports is that it is those swarthy foreigners — greasy South Americans and garlic eating Continentals in particular — who will do anything to gain an advantage. Not our brave boys: we're honest and true. Which is, of course, self-delusional bullshit as anyone who has watched the English national team in recent years, particularly the stamping, poking and gouging thug John Terry and Wayne 'goes down quicker than George Michael' Rooney.

This past few days we've had a couple of examples of true English sportsmanship. In a game featuring Crystal Palace and Bristol City, a clear goal by Palace was not allowed because the referee and his three assistants were the only ones in the stadium who failed to see it. Palace lost 1-0, which sent boss Neil Warnock, who tends to bleat like a fishwife even when things are going well, into near apoplexy. He rightly called the Bristol City players and coach 'cheats' for not saying something to the referee.



Then on to rugby, which has seen Dean Richards the coach of Harlequins (which apparently is a Rugby Union team - as opposed to Rugby League, I am unsure of the difference, it's all just beefy men in short-shorts to me) banned for three years for making his players fake injuries to get fresh players on the field. These were 'blood injuries', so the players had concealed blood capsules in their socks, as if canon fodder extras in a Hollywood shoot 'em-up, to pop into their mouths at the opportune moment. But the brilliant thing is that Richards' mea culpa was anything but, sure he held his hands up but, it was farcical because "it didn't pan out particularly well on the day." So, it's not really cheating if it doesn't work, then?

What people were reading today on the upper deck of the 242 from Shoreditch to Holborn

Lanky guy, mid-20s, hair cut close to disguise his receding hairline. Sat cross-legged taking up two seats, sighed loudly when someone had the temerity to ask if they could sit next to him: A Fraction of the Whole, Steve Tolz (Penguin).





Squat Asian woman, salt and pepper bun pulled back tight, mouthing words silently as she read: A battered, heavily annotated pocket sized leather editor of The Bible, I think NIV, couldn't see the publisher.





A well-fed City type, man in his early 50s, blue suite, powder blue shirt, self-satisfied rather punchable face: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson (Quercus).






Raven haired petite woman, olive skin, coal-dark eyes, next to me, her perfume something like lilacs and fresh cut grass: La chica que soñaba con una cerilla y un bidón de gasolina, Stieg Larsson. Incidentally, this is the second time in about two months I have seen someone reading this in Spanish. It's the second book, The Girl who Played with Fire in English and this translates to 'the girl who dreamed about a match and a can of gasoline.' Maybe it rolls off the tongue in Spanish.




Me: The Good Soldier Svejk, Jaroslav Hasek (Penguin Classics).







Everybody else: The freakin' Metro.

Revealed at last

"It is, in fact, Thomas Pynchon."

So that's the admission from a Penguin US publicist about the narrator for the YouTube trailer to his new stoner detective novel Inherent Vice, after some fine detective work by the WSJ's Speakeasy. Pynchon is all over the shop these days, putting together a music playlist for the book on Amazon.

Don't you forget about me

Well, R.I.P. John Hughes, chronicler of my generation's adolescence, the man who launched a thousand 80s catchphrases - "Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?" "Wha's happenin' hotsuff?' etc - and the careers of so many actors whose stars will never dim: Ally Sheedy, Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson. I do remember getting in umpteen Sheedy versus Ringwald debates in high school (I was firmly in the Sheedy camp).

Happened to walk by the Breakfast Club cafe in Soho yesterday, who appear to be in deep, deep mourning...

Triumph of the will

Less than a few hours after my grandmother was buried some 20 years ago, my cousins rolled up to her house with a moving van and cleared out some of the more precious family heirlooms, some that had not been itemised in my grandmother's will. We all deal with death in our own way; some grieve, some think 'what's in this for me?'

I thought about this the other day when I read the news that a judge in Florida has deemed there has been some dodgy dealing in the estate of Jack Kerouac. A forged signature coming to light on the will of his mother (who controlled his estate after he died) after a lengthy court battle.

Besides the issue of who should own the estate - the legal wrangling was begun in the early 1990s by Kerouac's daughter, who died in 1996 and had been excluded from it - the handling of the estate has not been without controversy. Strictly on a monetary level John Sampas, the brother of Kerouac's last wife who has run the estate since Kerouac's mother died in 1973, has turned it into quite a gold mine. Kerouac had $91 in his bank account when he died; now his estate is worth about $20m.

Sampas has been deft commercially, making Kerouac into a marketable brand, increasing the publishing output, licensing Kerouac's image, famously to Gap in order to sell khakis. But what angers most fanboys and girls, is that he has sold various Kerouaciana piecemeal: Kerouac's rain coat to Johnny Depp, the original scroll manuscript for On the Road to Jim Irsay, the owner of the Indianapolis Colts (for a cool $2.43m).

To be fair to Sampas, all his commercial operating has arguably kept Kerouac's literary star shining, both among academics and regular folk. But the estate has not been so forthcoming about some things, keen to keep some of the more, shall we say marketable, aspects of Kerouac's life, such as his bisexuality, out of the spotlight. Does this matter? Maybe a writer's life should be about the work. Yet I am not so sure. This may be the voyeur in me, but when I connect with a writer, I do like to know what makes them tick, and an unexpurgated version of their lives helps. I would have liked to have seen a lot of those letters that Cassandra Austen destroyed. Or Byron's memoir that John Murray burned.

Chimp and wolf

So Me Cheeta has garnered most of the Booker longlist headlines, which I think is no bad thing. The prize has shown an increasing commercial nous since Ion Trewin took over as administrator; throwing a curve ball like this into the mix in order to make people who usually wouldn't give a rat's ass about literature notice is just good PR. Like Child 44 last year, Me Cheeta has no chance of winning, or even getting on to the short list, but it has generated so much extra coverage (if only because sub-editors could write headlines like 'Chimp can be Booker top banana').

I have not read all the books on the list, but I would be surprised if any are better than Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. It is simply one of the best books I have read in quite some time, a wholly realised depiction of the Tudor court, focusing on Thomas Cromwell and his rise to power. I read it quite quickly, the re-read it two times in a row, because I just did not want to leave it.

Many historians seem to portray Cromwell - the man who paved the way for the break with Rome in order for Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn to marry - as corrupt or utterly ruthless. In literature, of course, he is the baddie who hounds Thomas More to his death in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons. Mantel goes some way to rescuing Cromwell reputation. Her Cromwell is brilliant and utterly compelling; a brewer's son (his low birth is often remarked upon by nobles), linguist, warrior, statesman, lawyer who is "at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop's palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury." Cromwell's humour contrasts with More's priggishness, hypocrisy and fundamentalism.

Death haunts this book. There is the fragility of simple daily life of the early modern period (Cromwell's wife and daughter are carried away in a day by the plague-like "sweating sickness") and the brutal, dangerous realpolitik at that fat bully-boy Henry VIII's court, where the axe or the stake were the end for so many. There is a poignancy that we know the main character will eventually go the way of More.

But Mantel's greatest achievement is to make an era which has been gone over time and again seem fresh and new. She has obviously done her research, but she wears it lightly, perhaps helped by her use of modernish dialogue.

East ender

I've crossed Old Man Thames by foiling the border guards at Tower Bridge and have moved into my new flat in Shoreditch, East London. "Trendy Shoreditch" I say to everyone as if that was the full name, though I'm not sure if the trendiest have moved further afield to Dalston, London Fields or somewhere else. Still, there is an abundance of directional hair cuts, tragically hip clothes and 2kool4skool fashion victims who have obviously not seen Nathan Barley.

Yes, many of the folk are walking clichés, but I love living here, I must admit. There is art and creativity everywhere, some of it having been spray painted on my building in the week or so since I have moved in:




But in just this week, I have fallen in with a group of filmmakers (your ExPat's first long dormant love is filmmaking), have been introduced to a new writers' group and, well, drank a lot of tequila and ended up falling asleep with sombrero on (it ain't all arty-farty).

Shameless plug

The new Writers' & Artists' Yearbook is out, the essential tome for all publishers, writers and aspiring writers out there. I urge you all to get a copy. Particularly useful this year is the insightful guide to the book trade, beginning on pg 316, by, er, me.

That's it for us, boys

The news today that scientists at the University of Newcastle and NorthEast England Stem Cell Institute have created human sperm in the laboratory will, if anything, lead to much religious and gender-role hand wringing in the press. It had me immediately thinking of a dystopian future where men, redundant of their only true biological purpose, are treated as second-class citizens and subjugated as sex slaves by a repressive matriarchy. Of course, that is one of my long-held fantasies, so fingers crossed.

It did lead to a rather fruity exchange on Radio 4's Today Programme which brought out my adolescent giggling inner-Beavis ("heh, heh, heh... he said sperm"). To be fair, presenter Evan Davis was not exactly taking it all that seriously, either. Asking another scientist whether the Newcastle team had actually created viable sperm, the scientist was unsure. "I've been looking at sperm under the microscope for every day of the last 20 years..." he began. "Well, somebody has to," interrupted Davis.

Seriously, the punditocracy's poring over the issue will be completely justified as it does raise a number of weighty issues. One, which rarely gets addressed, however, is why we need all this reproductive science in the first place. Last time I checked, the world's population was teetering on the unsustainable. Surely, there are enough babies to go around for barren middle class Westerners. Madonna and Angelina's much-derided third world baby shopping sprees are not so sinister after all; maybe it is much more responsible to get a child from Africa that to concoct it in an IVF clinic.

Boom boom

I worked out that Saturday was my 10th of the last 11 Independence Days that I have celebrated outside the the US of A. Or rather not celebrated; some years, particularly when I had to work, the day just passed me by. I did have a BBQ this year with some other ex-pats, a number of them working some vague jobs in the embassy that probably involves spiriting people away to Gitmo in the dead of the night, who kept complaining in their twangy Southern voices how shit living abroad was. Well, Cletus, get your ass back to the States, then.

Being a former East Coast liberal (East Coast former, not liberal former), the holiday wasn't really for me in the way that Christmas isn't really for the adults. As kids enjoy the Yuletide more, the 4th of July is more for guys named Jim Bob who drive pick-ups with gun racks and get misty-eyed belting out the opening words of The Star Spangled Banner.

Still, I did enjoy the Fourth as a kid, because it was the one time of year in fireworks-prohibited Massachusetts when we could readily get our hands on some ordnance. The names of those fireworks still trigger some sort of illicit giddiness, and I can practically smell the cordite: Roman candles, quarter milers, cherry bombs. A favourite was Chinese hoppers, the size of a AAA battery, which shot a jet of flame out of a hole on the side when lit, causing them to spin and bounce merrily. We used to throw them at each other. What larks!

But, ultimately what appealed most was the pure destructive power of the M-80, which was a quarter stick of dynamite. My brother and I used to tape four together and giggle "Think you used enough dynamite there, Butch?" whenever we blew something up. We did once attach 20 M80s together, ringing them around Mr Arroyo's abandoned shed. I do remember thinking as we watched the fire department hose down the wreckage of the burning shed a little later from our hiding place in the woods, that maybe, just maybe, a fireworks ban is a good idea.

Don't fuck it up, Jonze and Eggers

Where the Wild Things Are is the first book I remember reading on my own, the first book I got obsessed about. I would pester Miss Paine to have me read it aloud during show and tell to our first grade class almost daily (I also have a clear memory of on Columbus Day unashamedly singing an a cappella version of 1492 to the whole class at my own insistence - I've changed a bit since then).

Last time I was back at my parent's house, I was rummaging around in the basement and in a dusty box of my old things had a discovery that made a catch in the throat, a tear come to my eye: my old hardcover copy of the book, now about 40 years old, still with the bite marks when Sligo, our beloved Saint Bernard/Lab mix, got a hold of it, and the chip in the corner from when I bashed it over my sister's head (literature does have its practical uses).

So I was delighted to hear a while ago that Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers were teaming up for a movie version. But I was appalled at the rough cut trailer they released at the beginning of the year. It looked rubbish. But I think I was a bit premature; the new trailer looks brilliant and I am more than a bit excited about Eggers' novelisation, particularly the fur-covered edition. Yes, you read that right.

Salinger and doughnut holes

So, JD Salinger wins round one in his fight to stop "John David California" from publishing the unauthorised sequel to The Catcher in the Rye. I've not read the book, a friend has, but mining someone else's characters seems the laziest sort of writing. Still, it is an interesting legal question of how much you can use a character without authorisation, and how much of that character you can copyright.

But once again, I am struck by how much being a a recluse seems to grip the public's imagination, if only because it seems counter to the prevailing mood that fame is life's most desirable goal - and how journalists in particular obsess about this. I remember an Esquire article ages ago when the writer traveled to Salinger's home in the tiny town of Cornish, New Hampshire in order to try to run him to ground. I can't remember the writer's name and it isn't on their website, but I was able to track this illustration from the article down on a Salinger fan-site. The Esquire man eventually sees Salinger in a coffee shop, eating some doughnut holes. The piece was illustrated with this pic and for some reason it has haunted me. He's just a poor old man who wants to be left alone to enjoy a few doughnut holes. Leave him alone, already.

By the way, The Onion has the best take on the whole Salinger/California thing.

The Sherminator

My man Sherman Alexie (Expat's Files passim) has taken a chunk out of the Kindle, calling it elitist at this year's BEA (for those not in the book business, that's Book Expo America, not some organisation dedicated to the memory of my personal favourite Golden Girl Bea Arthur). Like anything that mentions the book trade's 500-pound gorilla Amazon, this has set the blogosphere alight. There is a good interview with Alexie on Edward Champion's blog where he clarifies his remarks.

I don't agree with all he says, but his central point that a device that costs $249 is exclusionary is spot-on. As a kid who grew up dirt poor on the reservation, I think Alexie could probably relate to the technology gap. There is a constant chatter about how wonderful the digital age is for the book industry. But it this mostly propelled by the self-perpetuating onanism of the blogosphere: because it is new, because it is fresh, and because I am writing about it, it must be on everyone's minds.

But the connected seem to forget how many are not connected. Between 60-70% of British people use the internet at home (reports vary). That is a lot of people, but that means least 18 million or so that don't, and most of them are obviously from poor backgrounds. The internet in and of itself is, if not elitist, exclusionary.

Another point that Alexie makes is the lack of emotional connection with an e-reader. I love my iPhone, and have tried reading e-books on it. But there is something that is just not right about it, something that makes me not engage with the text as I do a print book. Over the weekend I was reading a tiny, battered copy of Sentimental Journey that I purchased from Oxfam, which someone named James had given to Susan for her birthday in 1953 according to the inscription in the inside cover. When I put it down, I was able to keep my place with a bookmark a friend had made me for Christmas. The emotional connection is not just about the text.

This doesn't make me a Luddite. The digital age is a visual age and it just doesn't suit a black and white only e-book reader. I have read, and enjoyed, a number of graphic novels on the iPhone. And I do see a future for an enhanced e-book with music and moving images that will be seen and addition to the book.

Back by popular demand, or the demand of my one follower, anyway

'So, you'll have a wee dram, then?'

I'm on a press jolly up to Aberdeen, half for a book festival, half to tour the delights of North East Scotland. We've pitched up to Glen Garioch (pronounced 'Geery' for some unfathomable reason) distillery in Old Meldrum and Kenny, the witty and sharp fella who runs the place, is offering us some whisky.

It is 10.00 a.m.

Conscious of the time, Kenny serves us the eight-year-old as it is much smoother and will have less of a kick. It's so smooth, I end up having two or three as we watch a DVD of the history of the distillery, which puts me in a rather merry mood and I think of a new slogan for the brand: "Glen Garioch: The Breakfast of ex-Champions."

Kenny then leads us on a tour through the imposing granite distillery itself,which has been producing whisky since 1797, apart from a few years off when times were lean. It is an impressive series of buildings, and the process still seems very wonderfully Industrial Revolution: it is all gears and cogs and shiny vats and heavy solid machinery with Willy Wonka-esque coppery stills; in the entire tour I see only one computer.



Yet though the process on the surface has not changed, the industry has. Kenny tells us when he started there were 25 guys here, doing heavy, physical labour. Most of that is done off-site now under the auspices of its parent company Morrison Bowmore, and with increasing mechanisation, there is only need for a skeleton crew: 5 employees, one of which is full-time in the visitor centre, another is a cleaner. But you can tell Kenny himself has spent at least some of his working life using his brawn; he is square jawed and squat, a sort of Soviet Realist ideal of the working man, his hands bashed and mashed from years of moving hundredweight casks of whisky around, though one has an incongruous, tiny, delicate Sailor Jerry sort of swallow tattoo near the base of his thumb.

Glen Garoich used to have a peaty flavour, but when it was bought up by Morrison Bowmore (who themselves are owned by Japanese drinks giant Suntory), they were made to change to a sweeter more accessible drink. It is a strange thing. The whisky industry prides itself (and sells itself in a Mockintosh, tartan tat way) on tradition and how processes haven't changed in 200 plus years, but there are almost no independent distilleries in Scotland anymore. I couldn't help feeling as I left Glen Garoich some vague sense of loss, that in time past decisions might have been made in Old Meldrum for the benefit of the people living and working in the town, and now they are now being made by be-suited men in a Tokyo boardroom.

100

I haven't blogged for a while, for a number of reasons maybe due to being busy at work, but maybe more to a spate of having difficulty with London life; one can always find a few moments to dash off some nonsense - I just haven't been able to rouse myself. Of course maybe I was nervous - this is my 100th post (which accounts for the pealing of church bells and parades you may have noticed around the country today) and perhaps I wanted to do something special.

I started to write this blog to talk about books, my oh-so-acute thoughts and reflections, but also about living in Britain. A few years ago I remember first actually feeling part of this country when I was listening to Radio 4's Just a Minute and thought 'Oh, brilliant, Clement Freud is on today.' For my American readers, Just a Minute is a panel show where celebrity folk have 60 seconds to speak on a subject without "hesitation, repetition or deviation" and is as British as Marmite, binge drinking and horrific public transport.

Clement Freud was an institution as well. Grandson of Sigmund, brother of Lucian, Clement was an MP, broadcaster, trailblazing celebrity chef, writer and apparently as I listen to the eulogies on the radio - also famous at one point for a series of TV adverts for dog food with his bloodhound Henry. But I only knew him from Just a Minute, where his laconic, deadpan drawl would work nicely against Paul Merton's rapid-fire delivery or Ross Noble's Geordie surreal flights of fancy. I liked him because though he on the surface would be the more establishment figure on the show, coming from emigree royalty, being an MP and set against the young whipper-snappers comedians - he often was the most subversive.

He died whilst working at his desk, aged 84, which the writer in me thinks is how I would like to go. Of course, the pirate in me would like me to die from a bellyful of grapeshot whilst trying to board a frigate on the Spanish Main.

Hear, hear

Strangely, I have never tried an audiobook, but after interviewing an audiobook publisher recently, I decided to give a couple a go. It helped that this publisher gave me some downloads gratis - I cannot be bought, but I am shameless.


Of course, I am not totally new to spoken word. There is a lot of stuff on BBC Radio 4 I listen to like the Saturday Play or Book at Bedtime. But those have either a number of actors speaking the parts or are in short bursts. An audiobook reader's ability then, particularly if you are going to be with him or her for 100-200,000 words, is crucial. This was originally a problem with the first I listened to, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, read by Rupert Degas. Even before I checked his profile on IMDB which confirmed my suspicions, Degas sounded like an Englishman putting on an American accent, overemphasising every syllable like a the voice over of a Hollywood blockbuster trailer.

Yet that abated as the book went on, his voice becoming more in tune with McCarthy's spare, hard as granite prose. It perhaps helps that the novel is basically a two-hander—a man and a boy who are walking through a post-apocalyptic America—so he doesn't have to put on too many other voices for the dialogue.

Overall, the experience is enjoyable, but I couldn't really stop feeling that I was somehow cheating: I should be reading the book, not letting someone else do the work. I wonder, too, whether the next time I read a McCarthy book will I hear Degas in my head—which would be rather annoying. And here are some practical concerns. Trying to listen as I walked through London, with double-decker buses roaring by meant that I constantly missed things and had to rewind.

Rugger-buggers

As discussed earlier I have never really gotten into rugby, the second most popular sport over here. In the States, the only people who play it are annoying upper class frat boys, as a means to while away the idle hours between attempted date rapes. Which, actually, is pretty much rugby's constituency over here. I do appreciate the rampant homo-eroticism of the sport, though; the grappling and the outfits are not unlike what you might see walking through the streets of Soho at night.

Still, I got caught up watching the Six Nations this year (to the Expat's American audience: this is a yearly tournament between Europe's rugby powers: England, France, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and, er, Italy). There is something in that Orwellian dictum that sport, particularly on the international level, is essentially "war minus the shooting". My interest was piqued more on a vague patriotic, nationalistic and ancestral level; my Irish roots (and passport) mean I always cheer for the boys in green and it was nice to see them romp home with the Grand Slam (beating everyone else in the tournament).



The final Wales-Ireland game was enthralling, nevre-wracking, back and forth. I was swept up, found myself getting overly emotional at the end for a sport I don't really care about and a country I have never lived in. Thrilled for Ireland, but I also felt sad for the poor boy from Wales (didn't catch his name, but I'm betting the surname was Jones) who missed the kick at the very end which could have won it.

Walking in a Weegie wonderland

Up to Glasgow for a long weekend of visiting friends, heroic drinking and consuming a vast amount of deep fried food. I love the city and it compares favourably to other places I have lived recently. It is Edinburgh without the pretty buildings yet more smiles. A drunker yet more inhibited Hamburg. London's slightly cynical, less successful younger brother who is much better to hang out with.

It has a fearsome reputation as a haven for shell-suited criminal hardmen and sectarian football violence. There continues to be some truth in it - a headbutt isn't called a Glasgow kiss for nothing. There was a Celtic-Rangers cup final on Sunday and there was a bit of frisson in the air as I walked by groups of green and white hoops and blue tops, taking care not to make eye contact. And downtown you do see low-level dodgy crims, the junkies, the winos, neds looking for a score.

Yet Glasgow also crackles with creativity, punching above its weight with its artists, architects, writers and indie rockers. Walk around the West End and it is all arty and boho, chock-a-block with vintage clothes shops, funky little galleries, second hand bookstores.


One of my favourite places is Voltaire & Rousseau, a book shop on the banks of the Kelvin. To say it is a shop is a bit of a misnomer because you are not exactly encouraged to shop, but dig, rummage, excavate. The books are in no discernible order, piles about waist high obscure half the shelves, as you can see in the pic (which is also a rare snapshot of the University of Manooth's famed Irish Romanticism scholar and Charles Maturin expert Dr Jim Kelly). Cats scamper about, when you go to pay for books you feel guilty for interrupting the owner's reading time. But it is great, there are treasures if you look hard enough and is somewhere I can pleasantly while away hours, at least until the dust allergy kicks in.

Green green grass of home

I used to have a lot of time for Simon Schama as he wrote two of my favourite pieces of popular history, Citizens and The Embarrassment of Riches. But then around his BBC series History of Britain he went off the beam, morphing in a supersized twat, sashaying about the country in that ridiculous leather jacket. A painful misjudged attempt to be Rock n' Roll Historian, he came off like a "cool" dad throwing ten years out of date hip-hop slang into conversations with his teenage kids.

But he has clawed back a bit of respect for his pretty decent Radio 4 series on baseball, the first episode of which is about his (and my) team, the Boston Red Sox. Schama taught at Harvard in the 80s, and that is when he fell in love with the sport and the team. He has a convert's enthusiasm, so you can forgive him some lapses of detail - he says at one point that the Green Monster (above), one of Fenway Park's walls, is in centre field when it is in left. There are also some inaccuracies which a bit of judicious editing should have rectified. At one point he tells us that Fenway has the only old-time manual scoreboard in baseball. Then a few moments later he interviews the guy who runs the scoreboard who says that Wrigley Field and Fenway are the only two manual scoreboards in the league.

Still he gets the overall feel spot-on, particularly about his first encounter with baseball, which is not about the game per se, it is about the senses. One of my abiding memories of childhood is my first trip to Fenway, aged about five, up the stairs from the bowels of the stadium, dazzled by the field with grass the richest and deepest shade of green I have ever seen. And the smells: roasting peanuts, hot dogs, frying onions; and I could even smell the grass itself, which reminded me of the lawn at my grandmother's house. And hearing the jaunty tunes of the organ over the PA, vendors calling out in deep, thick Bostonian: 'Pahpcahn heah! Hot dogs heah!' I do not know how long I really stayed there, but when I think about I seem frozen forever, awed, hand in hand with my father, one of the few times I can recall him touching me.

Two Johns and a Dick

I stumbled upon this Dick Cavett post on the NY Times website the other day, with the video of a complete episode of Cavett's talk show from 1981 where he chatted to those poets of the suburbs, John Updike and John Cheever. As keen Expat File observers are aware, I do not hold much truck with Updike. As for Cheever I have only slightly more admiration, for much the same reason: that upper middle class WASP-y stuff just never moved me.

But what astonishes about the episode is that shows like this—a half-hour intelligent discussion with literary heavyweights—not only used to be shown on prime-time US television, but was actually relatively popular. I'll forgo any 'where have we gone' hand-wringing - Dukes of Hazzard, Love Boat and Bosom Buddies were more popular that year. TV has always largely been shit, but there always has been some brilliant stuff.

I was actually speaking about Bosom Buddies the other day at a party for some reason, and the guy I was talking to thought I was making it up because the premise sounds so improbable: a young Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari (no, you really shouldn't know who he is) play friends in New York City who can't find an apartment so they dress as women to be able to live in the female-only Susan B Anthony Hotel. Oh, the hilarity and hi-jinks that ensued as they tried to keep their identities secret from their hot neighbours!

Anyway, take a look at the Cavett show, the somewhat uncomfortable banter between the Johns is illuminating. Or treasure it for the quaint set design alone; you don't see many Persian carpets on chat shows these days.

America: not such the new black

Apropos of the previous post. I was in the locker room at the my council-run gym, the deteriorating spartan facilities of which resemble a sports club in some post-Ceauşescu Romanian parochial city about five or so years after the Soviet money dried up. The staff at that Romanian sports club would probably be cheerier than my gym's.

At any rate, these two guys were next to me, completely ripping into their incompetent colleague who had "cost the company shedloads, shedloads, mate." I couldn't follow what kind of business they were in, it was something financial or insurance which made my eyes glaze over. But my ears perked up at the last word, spoken with Olympian finality: "Yeah, well, he's American. From the American Hawaiian Islands, so you know he would be a bit dim."

I was mildly irritated, partially at the off-hand received wisdom that an American would be stupid. But what really galled was this bozo had emphasised that their co-worker was from the American Hawaiian Islands. As opposed to what, the Russian Hawaiian Islands? Obviously he had conflated some of his Pacific islands and doesn't know shit from Samoa.

America: the new black

I went to a screening of the documentary America Unchained the other night at the Clapham Picture House, followed by a Q&A with the film's star, comedian Dave Gorman (this is the cover of the companion book). It is sort of a 'set yourself a Morgan Spurlockian task' type doc: Gorman and a director try to travel across the US from California to the East Coast without buying anything from a chain store or big corporation. It is, as you might imagine, a difficult task. Filling up the gas tank proves most daunting, particularly on the highway, so Gorman ends up driving along the back roads through small town America.

The film is a trifle contrived, of course, but compelling, and it shows how in many ways Western society has lost a lot of its soul with corporate homogenisation. I say Western because this McDonaldisation is not just an American disease; just look at any UK high street.

A thing that struck me, though, was that the film was respectful, if not positively flattering, of most of the Americans in it. Small town Americans are easily caricatured, and often are, as thick-set, guileless, gun-toting, bible-bashing loons. But the people in Gorman's film are friendly, decent, curious and overly generous (for example he is invited to a family Thanksgiving dinner by a guy who runs the mom and pop hotel he is staying at).

There seems to be some sort of thawing of at least British attitudes towards Americans. The BBC's North American editor Justin Webb recently brought out a book eulogising how brilliant America is. This is a new, and slightly disconcerting experience for your Expat. I've not experienced much overtly hostile anti-Americanism since living abroad, except once having a pint of beer poured over my head by a fat, mustachioed Serb in Budapest during the height of the Kosovo conflict. But this was the sort of place where knife fights would occasionally break out, so I got off lightly. Mostly any anti-Americanism is subtler; people think I must be stupid and irony-free, speaking to me slowly and rather patronisingly.

The has gone by the board with goodwill from the Obama honeymoon continuing without abeyance - people are excited to talk to me about the US, ask me if I'm upset to be away at this historic moment, etc. There are smiles and thumbs up from my normally sour, scowling neighbour who once told me whilst we got talking at the recycling bin that the US was responsible for all the evil in the world and he hated all Americans ('you're not too bad, though').

Can't wait for the author tour

I was thinking of Thomas Pynchon yesterday in the news agent's, which was a shrine to Jade Goody, her bald pate plastered on every paper from the red tops to the broadsheets.

Being able to live your life on screen and in print is the most cherished goal of our narcissistic age; Goody choosing to have her death in front of it perhaps the pinnacle of that. Her publicist says now that she won't actually die on camera, but I am unconvinced. I suggested to colleagues that she will sell right to a camera installed in her coffin so viewers could see her body decompose. They thought this in bad taste, but surely it is the logical conclusion.

I don't begrudge Goody whatever money or fame she has found from, well, doing nothing apart from being a reality TV celebrity. If magazines and newspapers are willing to fork over cash to take photos of a cancer victim as she wastes away, she would be stupid not to take it. And complaining about it in a blog which is itself some form of narcissism would be a tad ironic.

But there was perhaps a balancing out of the universe when Pynchon's new book was bought by a UK publisher in the week Goody announced she had a month or so to live. Pynchon, choosing to live his life out of the public eye, is the matter to Goody's anti-matter; if the two ever met there would probably be some rent in the time space continuum, destroying life as we know it. He is often called a 'recluse' in the press, but that is just journo-speak for not speaking to the press. He apparently lives in New York City, has a family, gets out to gigs and is a fan of at least one indie rock band. He obviously has some sense of humour about the whole thing as well, having sent up his whole image on The Simpsons twice.

But I find it comforting that there is still someone out there who lets the work speak for itself. His next book is to be a detective novel and though it assuredly won't be like most of the genre, it may be more accessible than his other books. I once read Mason & Dixon and Gravity's Rainbow back-to-back, which I do not recommend. It was difficult, not Finnegans Wake difficult, but I felt blinkered, bludgeoned and beaten up, and couldn't read anything more challenging than Heat magazine for about a month. But the crime novel might lead to more fans. His last book Against the Day sold 10,500 copies in the UK. Jade Goody's first autobiography: 130,000. I'll let you draw your own conclusions about what that says about the times we live in.

On the bus 1

The cattle car closeness of London transport means it is difficult to even open up a tabloid, so many folk read books. I find this comforting; the world might be a more sane and safer place if people ignored the constant shriek and wail of the daily newspapers. Trade magazines should still be read scrupulously, though.

Today on the 176, I'm uncomfortably sandwiched in my seat in the wilderness of the back row, upper deck. A large woman opposite, her thighs spill over into the next seat, is reading MacSweeney's 24. I have a finely tuned Ameri-dar - the ability to pick out my countrymen by sight - and even before she speaks into her mobile and I get the flash of tell-tale American pearly whites when she smiles, I know that her voice will have the metallic twang of those square wheat producing states out west.

A teenage black girl is next to her, almost edged out of her seat by the American woman's ample thighs. The girl has a long scar over her face, a diagonal slash from right eyebrow down to her jaw. I try to imagine what caused it, and the pain. She probably doesn't think this when she looks into the mirror, but the scar gives her a haunting beauty. She is rather furtively reading a library copy of Black Lace Quickies 1, her eyes darting around as if expecting someone to catch her.

Across the way a pink cheeked jolly looking woman - I imagine her being an enthusiastic, if inexpert karaoke singer - is chuckling at Stuart Maconie's Pies and Prejudice. A tough looking, blocky fellow with a ruddy face that looks like it has seen its share of bar fights, is nearing the end of Elizabeth George's What Came Before He Shot Her.

A large, floppy haired indie boy - think Jack White's beefier brother - next to me is engrossed in the The Brothers Karamazov, a hardcover edition with yellowing pages, from Oxfam, I notice approvingly as he flips to the front page with the price. For some reason I hope desperately that he is reading on his own and not for some course. And me? Well I'm writing this all down in my Moleskine and I notice that Brothers Karamazov is surreptitiously looking at what I am writing. Can you read my scrawl, O Jack White's beefier brother? Can you?

Southern gothic

Since the New Year I have not read anything new, going back to old favourites (A Fan's Notes, A Confederacy of Dunces, Tropic of Cancer) and things I have never got around to reading.

One of the 'never got round to' books is Carson McCuller's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. About ten years ago, I went through a phase of Southern American literature, but I got burnt out reading about the freaks, idiot man-children, moonshine-soaked pastors, whiskey priests, redneck racists, eccentrics, hucksters, con men and other grotesques who seemed to make up the entire population of Dixie in the first half of the twentieth century.

Lonely Hunter does have the freaks; two of the main characters are a deaf-mute and an out of control alcoholic communist. But they are more sympathetically drawn than the characters in, say, Flannery O'Connor's stuff. What the book is really about is being an outsider. Four alienated people - the alcoholic; the repressed, possibly gay owner of an all-night cafe; the tomboyish teenage girl who dreams of becoming the next Mozart; a black doctor who chafes at the South's racism and the plight of his people - are drawn to the deaf-mute Singer, impelled to spill out their stories to him.

Singer doesn't answer, of course, but by reading lips, he listens, and maybe that is what people really need, someone just to acknowledge their story. With an overriding theme of loneliness and that much of the action takes place in a 1930s cafe at night, I constantly thought of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, of how we are often cut off and isolated from the world, even when sitting next to them at a greasy spoon counter.

McCullers was 23 when she wrote it which seems well-nigh impossible; it is far too wise to have been written by someone so young. But she had a short, sickly life (three strokes by the time she was 30, dead at 50) and perhaps she sensed innately that her time was short. There is something poignant about this photo, her peculiar avian beauty augmented by the haunted, vaguely troubled look in her eyes.

The death of Stewie

Life is so transient, is it not? Here is Stewie, one of the snowmen I created on Monday. Look at him in the first flush of youth at the beginning of the week, all smiles with a future as pure and white as Arctic landscape ahead of him. Just a couple of days later he is slumped into decrepitude, and there he is today, an ex-snowman.

It was a heart rending sight to come home from a weekend away to see all that remains of Stewie was his leek nose (I had had no carrots), his Ireland scarf and a blob of snow. Though Stewie's life was brief it flashed across the firmament, touching so many of us. It was but a week, but what a week, what a week.

I had a quick memorial service over Stewie's remains with Brutus' words on Cassius inevitably coming to mind: 'I owe more tears to this dead man than you shall see me pay.' Then I scooped the remaining snow into a pitcher and with the help of my liquor cabinet turned Stewie-that-was into a strawberry margarita. It was what he would've wanted.

Live from Television Centre

Here's my spot on Working Lunch on BBC2 this afternoon, spouting off about how to get a book published. My bit is 21.49 into the programme, if you fancy a gander. I've tried to embed it but I can't figure out how to crack the iPlayer's DRM. I know doing so would not be entirely legal (or legal at all), but what the hell do I pay my licence fee for if I can't rip off copyrighted material from Aunty? So if any of the Expat Files many followers who are experts in illegal downloads want to lend a hand...

It was a rather nerve wracking experience beforehand, knowing I would be live and worried that I would say something stupid, inadvertently drop the F-bomb or decide to do an impromptu strip-tease. But I seemed to settle down once I got on that fuschia couch, helped by the warm metaphorical televisual embrace of Declan Curry and Naga Munchetty. I especially enjoyed near the end when they superimposed the "Tom's Tips" graphic.

No business like snow business

The snow that paralysed South East Britain today was what we native New Englanders would call a dusting. True it was the biggest snowfall in England in the last 18 years, but I am always amused at the havoc relatively mild weather events create in London and I found myself wondering today, as I frequently do, how these people once managed to conquer most of the globe.

I had a grand old time, a productive day working from home (the boss may be reading this), followed by snowy fun. I created a snowman and snow woman, then a snow tree of knowledge, and told them not to eat the fruit from it. Then off to pelting the neighbourhood kids with snowballs - the trick is to pack the snow down really hard so it's almost ice, then go for head shots.

Walking around, everyone seemed so friendly and happy. My neighbour, a large forbidding Jamaican woman who heretofore had only acknowledged my greetings with a scowl, stopped to chat, all smiles and twinkly effervescence about seeing her first snow. The grandmother, single mom and two daughters who live a couple doors down - my relationship with them is more courteous, we give each other slight nods of recognition when we pass on the street - effusively showed me their snow woman, complete with pink scarf and hat. It was if the storm had melted that icy urban wall between us that makes London such an unfriendly place. In the midst of all this snow the city finally became warm.

Here's my swag...

...and a few of photos from the excellent Alternative Press Fair , which I went to today (incidentally I advise caution to any of the Expat File's many epileptic followers wishing to click on that hyperlink; there is some sort of strobe effect going on across their banner). The fair was at the St Aloysius Social Club near Euston station, wonderfully no-frills, slightly down at the heels, not seen a lick of paint since the 1970s. It seems like an actual working social club. There is a bar at the end of the hall and in one corner sat four old fellas who looked like ardent News of the World readers. It was obviously their local and they seemed bemused at the collection of art school hipsters and comic book nerds, although they were quite appreciative of the comely girl with the pink hair and 1950s cocktail dress as she sashayed past them.




As I make my coin serving mainstream media masters it was refreshing seeing all these folk who are scribbling, drawing and crafting away, just for the love of it. And it is inspiring, and makes my own project [see resolution 2 in previous post - ed.] seem a bit more manageable and less daunting.

It was a bit disconcerting going through the stalls, with the creators eyeballing you expectantly as you leaf through their work, work that because of small print runs and niche-within-a-nicheness is so intensely personal. That did put a bit of pressure; Khaled Hosseini or Dave Eggers don't hover nearby in anticipation as you peruse their books in Waterstone's. I did look up from reading Skinny Bill in...Bill's Birthday, half-smiling at its funny/sad tone to see the author staring at me intently. It was a slightly awkward moment, and to fill the silence I asked her if it was strange watching people react to her work. She said yes, it is like having a conversation with someone but they're not answering back.

Resolutionary road

As January draws to a close, thought I would update the progress of my New Year's Resolutions:

1. Finish the novel. Well, I am scribbling away, though have retrenched and changed focus and rather than being 3/4 the way there, am now probably half way there, which seems like some sort of Zeno's Paradox of novel writing. And I have also bashed out a few short stories lately for which I am currently awaiting rejection letters from top-flight literary magazines. So I'm relatively happy, though this resolution has been my top priority for the last three years.

2. Get my 'McSweeney's for the UK, but warmer and with a little less nudge, nudge, wink, wink knowing irony' thing off the ground. Slightly hamstrung, at least by my lack of design skills and that my friend the web designer for some reason is taking paying gigs rather than working for the love of literature. Content rolling in, though, and it looks on course for a 2009 launch. Any Expat File fans wishing to contribute are free to send me ideas.

3. Washboard abs. Yes, this is rather vain; a friend rolled her eyes when I told her this resolution saying 'Well, that's worthwhile.' But there is some vanity to doing a blog, isn't there? Anyway, I do go to the gym frequently and have largely been eating well - even an Actimel of a morning which apparently keeps Sir Bobby Charlton full of jizz. So I am in reasonable shape. But washboard abs need that little extra bit of sacrifice, and will probably require me stopping boozing and refraining from the occasional cod and chips at The Frying Fisherman on Camberwell Church Street, both of which may not happen.

4. Learn the guitar properly. There my guitar sits as I write this, in the corner of the room, dusty and untouched. I did however, download an application to my iPhone that is a guitar tuner and has lists of chords. Next month!

5. Get back into German. Ach, mensch, Ich bin so faul gewesen. Im nächsten Monat!

5. More do-gooding. Though I am still doing my tireless Amnesty work, I have not contacted Shelter, Oxfam or any of the vast number of organisations that I was planning on volunteering for. Next month!

All and all, not too bad. Writing on schedule, literary project coming on, body fascist vanity project OK. Personal development and helping out my fellow man, not so much.